The Best of Slate: A 10th Anniversary Anthology
edited by David Plotz
Atlas Books, 277 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Why fork over $13 – or $9.97, if you use the fulfillment service on Slate.com’s click-through ad – to read anything that’s free online? Unless you’ve been deliriously in love with Slate since its 1996 inception as a Microsoft joint, unless you stayed tuned during the magazine’s subscription-only phase and through the various changings of the editorial guard, you might well ask. The answer to this question also suggests the reasons for the venerable webzine’s relative longevity: good writing and the occasional fearless stance on politics and culture. Several selections dissect the sacred cows of liberalism with gusto you’ll not see on Salon: Paul Berman’s “The Cult of Che,” Christopher Hitchens’ “Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore,” and Harriet McBryde Johnson’s “Not Dead at All: Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo.” The topper by far is “The Misunderstimated Man: How Bush chose stupidity,” a well-reasoned 2004 op-ed arguing that the “dedicated fool” at the helm of our nation knows full well that he’s an idiot. It’s also a cracking read (“A fourth and final quality of Bush’s mind is that it does not think”). Less effective is Slate‘s more recent slide into mealy-mouthed consideration of hot topics in the blogosphere, represented in this collection by Meghan O’Rourke’s “It’s a Jerk: Should men want to watch their wives give birth?” O’Rourke doesn’t venture an opinion, but she trots out Shulamith Firestone and Catharine MacKinnon as examples of feminism’s hysterical fringe – without really relating either to the debate. More recently online, editor-at-large Jack Shafer gave a similarly lukewarm, blandly contrarian response to Michael Noer’s Forbes piece titled “Don’t Marry Career Women,” but his contribution here – “The New Vanity Press Moguls” – is a riot to read and far more astute. Other selections prove Slate can be as twee and irrelevant as anything in the McSweeney’s cosmos (Edmund Levin’s piece on duplicating Proust’s celebrated Madeleine, chiefly), but the collection rounds itself out with several lively one-offs from occasional contributors, such as Rebecca Liss’ sparse, engaging narrative of former Marine Dave Karnes’ rescue of two survivors at the World Trade Center. Of course, 2000’s “How the Grinch Stole Election Day” is represented, so now we can all stop e-mailing it to one another. Note: The edition used for this review lists on its cover but does not actually contain Seth Stevenson’s “Tangled Up in Boobs: What’s Bob Dylan doing in a Victoria’s Secret Ad?” – a sterling example of Slate’s commercial criticism.
This article appears in 25th Anniversary.